The pandemic accelerated the urgency for reform in health and social care around the world, which strained resources to unprecedented levels. The effects are still being felt and in Northern Ireland specifically, ongoing political instability is further complicating approaches to digital transformation. Although progress is being made that should be recognized and celebrated, Dan West, CDIO for Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland’s Department of Health, understands that the pandemic still casts a lingering shadow over national health and care systems, contributing to continuing rampant fatigue among staff and subsequent strikes over pay.
“From a people perspective, things are pretty strained at the moment,” he says. “All of the capacity and operational challenges that were present in healthcare prior to the pandemic are magnified now. Waiting lists have grown and diagnosis and treatments have been delayed or missed due to some of the burden the pandemic brought on the system. Plus, the absence of a functioning devolved executive, due to an ongoing dispute by the DUP over the Northern Ireland protocol, adds to all of those challenges. It all reduces the ability to arrive at a budget settlement that shifts resources into the health and social care space. So you can see how my job has had to react to all of those stimulants.”
Leaders in the public sector and healthcare might worry about a return of red tape that could slow down innovation, too, but West has a more resilient outlook to progress by, as he says, never wasting a crisis.
“We’ve been able to accelerate the things we knew we needed, but we also had a rate of adoption of collaboration and flexible working tools that we wouldn’t have seen in peacetime, if you like,” he says. “I was doing some work in a trust in the English NHS and we gave everybody tools, laptops and mobile solutions, and redesigned the operating model and how we worked together. There was resistance, though, where people felt they still needed an office, but there was an exponential increase in the use of virtual tools and capabilities to how we interacted with each other as professionals, and with our patients. We need to make sure that how we deliver digital capability to our staff, and how we do digital enablement of services for citizens, is not allow that elasticity in bureaucracy to snap us back to traditional ways of working.”
CIO Leadership Live’s Drinkwater recently spoke with West about how to put people first in a system under increasing pressure to function as it strives to digitally transform amid a backdrop of political and environmental uncertainty. Watch the full video below for more insights.
On balancing efficiencies: To sustain health and social care services into the future, we need to find a way to get more output from the same or maybe even reducing resources. And I don’t think anybody would suggest that digital is some kind of panacea to all of this. The real requirement is in and around staff. But the absence of the money to hire more doctors and nurses, the lead time, and then training them to bring them into the service means that digital has to be part of the jigsaw puzzle to address those challenges. The projects and products we delivered during COVID-19 adopted some of the techniques and technologies that allowed more efficient digitally enabled services.
